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A
US ear if the price is
right
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, who has sent 20,000 troops to Iraq and
Afghanistan, got warm words, a press conference
and dinner. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun,
who has sent 3,000 troops to Iraq, got nice words,
a photo-op and lunch. Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, who just reached an agreement that
will enable Washington to use Incirlik air base
for its Iraq operations indefinitely, got coffee.
And each of them - democratically elected
leaders of long-time military allies who have been
battered by public opinion at home for defending a
close relationship with Washington - got virtually
nothing they really wanted (except maybe the
sugar) during their respective meetings at the
White House last week with US President George W
Bush.
Meanwhile, US industries that
provided lavish campaign contributions to Bush and
other Republican Party candidates in last year's
election made out like bandits without even having
to show up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, at least not
personally.
The tobacco industry, which
spent 75% of its nearly US$4 million in campaign
contributions last year on Bush and the
Republicans, got a really big present this week
when the Justice Department reduced its request
for damages in a racketeering trial that the
government had already won from $130 billion to
$10 billion to finance a national anti-smoking
campaign over the next 25 years. That's a likely
savings of $120 billion. Billion, not million.
Top Justice Department politicos even
asked that its own witnesses soft-peddle their
testimony so as not to move the judge to impose
the larger fine anyway.
The much-larger
fossil-fuel industry, which spent 80% of its $25
million in campaign contributions on Bush and the
Republicans last year and has profited handsomely
already from policies pursued by Bush since he
came to office last November, also seems to have
benefited in a somewhat unexpected way.
It
turns out the chief of staff for the White House
environmental office, who was also the oil
industry's chief lobbyist against placing limits
on the emission of greenhouse gases, has been
assiduously editing government climate reports "in
ways that play down links between such emissions
and global warming", according to The New York
Times.
The official, Philip Cooney,
formerly of the American Petroleum Institute, has
no scientific training and hence no competence to
alter the work of government scientists, but
apparently that did not stop him. Thus, the
"attribution of the causes of biological and
ecological changes to climate change or
variability" became not just "difficult" but
"extremely difficult".
It was no wonder
then that, when asked during a press conference
last week with Blair, who has been pressing Bush
since 2001 to take more aggressive action on
emissions, about whether he believed emissions
caused global warming, the president replied that
his government was still spending a lot of money -
more than anyone else, after all - studying the
problem.
What united the three leaders who
visited Bush last week, apart from their
countries' more than 50-year alliance with the
United States, was the fact that their electorates
have all become thoroughly disillusioned with the
US president, particularly with respect to his
foreign policy.
Thus, traveling to
Washington, essentially as supplicants with
specific requests without their being agreed in
advance, carries with it serious political risks.
Indeed, Washington's credibility and
favorability ratings, as measured by a series of
public-opinion polls, have fallen as or more
sharply since Bush became president in the
visitors' three countries as in any other country
outside the Arab world. Given the strategic
importance of Britain, South Korea and Turkey,
that fact alone should have made Bush, who has
tried hard in his second term to reassure allies
about his willingness to listen, unusually eager
not only to listen, but to please.
But it
didn't.
While Bush certainly did not
humiliate the visitors, as he did four years ago
with Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, or commit
any major gaffes, at least publicly, he also gave
virtually no ground on any major substantive
issue, with the arguable exception of Blair's
appeal for an agreement with Britain on how the
multilateral debt of the world's poorest nations
could be canceled.
Blair had wanted some
new words, some new commitment on curbing global
warming and on tripling aid to Africa - the two
themes he promised to make priorities when Britain
become chairman of the Group of Eight (G-8). He
got nothing on both counts, although the White
House announced it had reprogrammed about half a
billion dollars in undisbursed aid for
humanitarian relief in Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Roh had hoped that Bush would indicate
either a willingness to put more incentives on the
table to lure North Korea back into the six-party
talks on nuclear disarmament or greater
flexibility engaging in bilateral talks with
Pyongyang. Bush, who at least referred to the
North Korean leader as "Mr" - rather than as a
"tyrant" or some other derogatory term as has been
his wont - declined.
Erdogan had wanted
Bush to commit US forces to crack down hard on
Iraqi-based guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers
Party, which last year ended its unilateral
ceasefire and began mounting attacks in Turkey
that so far have killed hundreds of Turkish troops
and police. Bush, who declined to even host the
prime minister for lunch, apparently as punishment
for the Turkish parliament's decision not to let
Washington use its territory to invade Iraq in
2003, not only rejected the request, but insisted
Turkey cooperate much more in isolating Syria and
Iran.
Adding insult to injury, it fell to
Republican majority leader Bill Frist, a staunch
White House ally, to then demand on the Senate
floor that the visiting prime minister "speak
clearly in defense of our partnership and to
dispel a wave of anti-Americanism [in Turkey] that
runs counter to the last five decades of
cooperation".
"Nothing is so fatal to a
nation as an extreme of self-partiality, and the
total want of consideration of what others will
naturally hope or fear," wrote Edmund Burke, the
British conservative.
Perhaps a campaign
contribution would help overcome the problem.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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